Official Daddy Blogger, “The Dadabase,” from May 2011 to June 2014

Search Box

The Rules Of A Game Sometimes Change With A 3 Year-Old

Last month for your birthday, one of the gifts Mommy and I got for you wasDinosaur Train: Make A Match.

It’s the classic memory matching card game, but with a few twists… like the “Take Buddy” card.

The game comes with a little plastic action figure of Buddy, one of the characters from the TV show.

Whoever has Buddy at the end of the game gets a lot of extra bonus points, which in itself could lead to winning the game.

Of course, you don’t care about the points. For you, winning the game means not losing Buddy.

As Mommy and I learned, the game actually ends the moment that she or I draw the “Take Buddy” card and try to, as the card implies, take Buddy from you.

The youngest player starts with Buddy, so if we actually played by the rules, it would mean about 90 seconds into each game, the game would end… because you would get Buddy taken away from you.

So, our rules for the game mean that no matter what, Buddy is yours for the entire game. It’s just about matching the cards, and sometimes, you even use the kitchen tongs to pick up the cards and place them in your Tonka dump truck.

There will come a day when the rules will actually matter when we play family board games. But for now, just as there is no crying in baseball, there is no crying in Dinosaur Train: Make A Match.

And the reason there is no crying in this game is because we don’t play by the rules.

I think it’s safe to say we need to very slowly (!) work our way up to other classics such as Monopoly, which is all about taking away from the other players until they gradually wither away to nothing.

Yeah, we’ve still got a few years before we try that one out as a family.